Wreck & Reference – Want

I’m a man, goddamnit. I’m not fat. I don’t cut myself and I don’t cry after sex. I know I was never a vampire and neither was (redacted) and that blood fucking, rape fantasy and corpse play are not the sort of practices that happen their way, everyday into the balance of your (even not so) average love life. I understand that restricting yourself to coffee, bananas and cigarettes is as symptomatic of an eating disorder as puking up a Sunday brunch. I get that dog collars are not ready to wear and that all black everything, though slimming, is not appropriate attire for most weddings, or christenings or minor league ball games.

I’m also aware that reports of my suicides may have been grossly exaggerated.

And that really is a shame.

Not that I’m not dead, mind you. In fact, I’m perfectly fine with being alive. Sure there are some times when the weight of my own mistaken humanity is enough to make me want to fill my lungs with tuning forks and shattered glass and others, still, when the endless flashes of horror that punctuate the greater arc of the world align in a panicked pastiche to fill my soul with ideations that leapfrog death straight into pure fucking Armageddon but, on the whole…you know…I’m pretty okay with being present and accounted for.

I’ve got enough good things around me to keep trying and enough decency inside to figure I’m better off alive than ash in a closet, somewhere, earning dust under a name as forgettable as air.

It’s just that those stories meant so much, for so long it didn’t seem to matter what was truth and what was invention just so long as it shored up who I was and, consequently, how I presented myself.

Which is why I can’t or, rather, why I won’t go on with Want. I will happily concede that Want is a record of fierce integrity, sonic depravity and brutishly nuanced mindfucking that heralds a new era of artful bleakness for the boys of Wreck & Reference but I just can’t give it anymore of my time. It speaks too closely to the era of the idiot kid I won’t deny but have grown increasingly cautious of parading so flagrantly.

I just don’t believe in him anymore. Not like I did, at least. Drowning in a plumage of self-abuse under the charmless arm of wasted youth. I’m not him and I have no interest in being anything at all like I could have been given the right audience and another crack at the medicine chest.